DT Calculator iPhone App Review.

Server failures happen frequently, and even though they go unnoticed most of the times, IT guys always want to know what and why it happened and managers want to know how much it cost the business. DT Calculator from Storagepipe attempts to deal with the second part of the inquiry. DT Calculator allows users to calculate the cost of server failure by correlating various constants that define their business, such as Yearly Revenue, Business Hours in a Year and employee data.

It can't get any simpler than this

The iPhone app features just one screen where you need to focus your attention. Fill in as little as six fields and the app calculates loss for you. Fields include Yearly Revenue, Business Hours in a Year, Impact on Sales, Number of Employees Affected, Average Employee Cost per Hours and Average Percentage They Are Affected. Push the red "Panic" button and you're off to the Downtime Cost.

The app will calculate your loss based on how much time the server is down. The timer is in seconds, and for every second there is a cost associated. You can Pause and even Reset the timer, but apart from this there's not much you can do except sit back and watch.

Improvements

At first, I figured that this neat little app will allow IT administrators and their managers to run server failure simulations and get a real cost analysis of unexpected failures. However, the way it performs that calculation might lead users to believe that IT administrators need to be always aware of server failures and whenever those happen, push the "Panic" button.

I personally would have seen more use in the app if it would have allowed its users to run different scenarios based on the time component. I am thinking of DT Calculator allowing me to analyze how much I would lose in terms of money if the server failure continued for a specified amount of time, which can be in incremental values such as 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours, etc.

What if?

You might wonder why the app counts over 28MB in size if you only have on screen that does all the work. No, the calculation is not that complex that it would need to take up so much space on your iPhone. Instead, DT Calculator packs a great deal of additional information in the form of videos that are available from your iPhone, instead of online.

While these videos are certainly informative, they provide no additional purpose to the calculator itself. Instead, the videos portray several problem situations where your business might be in need of Storagepipe's services. What if you needed an online storage solution fully automated? What if you would need to perform server queries that push your server to its limits and this could be done with an offsite solution?

DT Calculator certainly needs some basic improvements from my point of view. It can certainly turn out to be a critical app on every IT administrator's iPhone. It can certainly turn out to equip managers with a great alternative to do cost analysis of server failure. But for now, what the app does extremely well is present users with the array of cloud-based data protection technologies from Storagepipe.